Jane Austen, in her "Northanger
Abbey," treats it with great insight, in the relations of Catherine
Morland, Isabella Thorpe, and Eleanor Tilney. Miss Edgeworth's
"Helen" is likewise full of it: both its sympathies and its
antagonisms are forcibly depicted. Helen Stanley is Lady Cecilia's
double, her second self, her better self. Lady Katrine Hawksby is
such an acidified piece of envy, so jealous of all her sex, that
"every commonly decent marriage of her acquaintance gives her a sad
headache." That there is truth in this bitter stroke cannot be
denied; but there is truth as well in the extreme opposite. Many a
girl, with a sublime self-renunciation, stifling an agony sharper
than death, has given up a lover to a friend, in silence and secrecy.
Women are capable of any sacrifice, and their grandest deeds are
hidden. Could any woman capable of voluntarily withdrawing herself,
in order that her friend might marry the man they both loved, be
capable of boasting of it, or willingly letting it be known?

Mrs. Barbauld gives a beautiful description of pious friendship in
her hymn beginning,

How blest the sacred tie that binds
In union sweet according minds!
How swift the heavenly course they run
Whose hearts, whose faith and hope, are one!
Their streaming tears together flow
For human grief and mortal woe;
Their ardent prayers together rise
Like mingling flames in sacrifice.

Pictures of female friendships, in all their glory and tragedy, their
ecstatic fusions and heroic sacrifices, their bitter jealousies and
inversions, abound in the great dramatists, who are the crowned
expositors of human nature. Auger, Secretary of the French Academy,
in his "Philosophical and Literary Miscellanies," has an excellent
little essay entitled, "The Friendships of Women among themselves
compared with the Friendships of Men among themselves; Difference of
the two Friendships, and the Causes of that Difference." The essay,
though not adequate, is true and suggestive. Charles Lamb's poem of
"The Three Friends, "--Mary, Martha, and Margaret--is an extremely
truthful and effective description of female friendship, its fervor,
jealousy, estrangement, generosity, and restoration.

Grace Aguilar has written a work expressly on the subject of Woman's
Friendship. Though not a work of a high order, it possesses
considerable interest as a tale; and, as a treatment of the theme, it
is full of sincere feeling and discriminating observations. In